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    Existence And Being
    Existence And Being
    Existence And Being
    Ebook334 pages7 hours

    Existence And Being

    By Martin Heidegger

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    The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger’s philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev’s case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers’s that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger’s case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude.
    With the four essays in this book, which Professor Heidegger gave me, this much-discussed philosopher now appears for the first time before the English-speaking world. As Professor Heidegger pointed out to me, the four essays are complementary and have an organic unity. Two deal with the essence of metaphysics, the other two with the essence of poetry. The two Hölderlin studies, in Heidegger’s words, were “born out of a necessity of thought” conditioned by the questions raised in the metaphysical papers.
    STEFAN SCHIMANSKI
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMar 24, 2011
    ISBN9781446548226
    Existence And Being
    Author

    Martin Heidegger

    Martin Heidegger (Messkirch, 1889 – Friburgo de Brisgovia, 1976) es una de las figuras clave de la filosofía contemporánea. Estudió con Husserl y fue profesor de Filosofía en las universidades de Marburgo y Friburgo. En esta última ejerció como rector entre 1933 y 1934. Su obra filosófica gira en torno al concepto del Ser, empezando por una hermenéutica de la existencia y pasando por la dilucidación de la noción griega de la verdad.

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      Existence And Being - Martin Heidegger

      EXISTENCE

      AND BEING

      by

      MARTIN HEIDEGGER

      With an introduction by

      WERNER BROCK DR. PHIL

      CONTENTS

      Foreword

      Introduction

      Prefatory Note

      A Brief Outline of the Career of M. Heidegger

      An Account of Being and Time

      1. The three main problems: Dasein, Time and Being. The project and the published version

      2. Some aspects of the analysis of Dasein

      3. Dasein and Temporality

      4. Some reflections on the significance of the work

      An Account of The Four Essays

      1. A brief general characterisation of the four essays

      2. On the Essence of Truth

      3. The Essays on Friedrich Hölderlin

      4. What is Metaphysics?

      Note

      Remembrance of the Poet

      Translated by Douglas Scott

      Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry

      Translated by Douglas Scott

      On the Essence of Truth

      Translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick

      What is Metaphysics?

      Translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick

      Notes

      Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?

      — Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden ist der Schleier des Seins.

      MARTIN HEIDEGGER

      FOREWORD

      In appearance, Professor Heidegger is short and slight; his hair is thick and jet black with occasional white streaks. When he emerged from the small skiing hut, high up in the mountains, to greet me, he was dressed in the costume of a Swabian peasant, a dress he often also used to wear when he was Rector of Freiburg University. His heavy, squarish skiing boots (it was summer) emphasised still more strongly his relationship to the soil. He was born in 1889, in Messkirch and his brother still farms in the region. Martin Heidegger, too, has never left it. When Hitler called him to Berlin in 1935, he rejected the offer. The world had to come to him, to Freiburg. There he lives, with Hellingrath’s edition of Hölderlin’s works. This closeness to Hölderlin is no accident but an essential key to an understanding of Heidegger’s own philosophy. For Hölderlin came from the same physical region, he faced the same spiritual problems, and he experienced more lucidly and bitterly the ultimate meaning of nothingness than any other person who could give expression to it in song. The parallel with Heidegger is close, indeed, if thought is substituted for song.

      On both occasions when I met Professor Heidegger, in June, 1946, and in October, 1947, I had to drive for an hour to the small town of Todtnau in the Black Forest Mountains, then to climb still further until the road became a path and all human habitation scattered and invisible There on top of a mountain, with the valley deep down below, with nothing but space and wilderness all around, in that small skiing hut, I spoke to the philosopher. He had not been to Freiburg for six months when I saw him for the second time. His living conditions were primitive; his books were few, and his only relationship to the world was a stack of writing paper. His whole life revolved within those white sheets and it seemed to me that he wanted nothing else but to be left in peace to cover those white sheets with his writing.

      The atmosphere of silence all around provided a faithful setting for Heidegger’s philosophy. I could not help comparing it with the atmosphere I had encountered in the house of Professor Berdyaev near Paris and that of Professor Jaspers in Heidelberg. In every case, the external world faithfully reflected the world of the mind. In Berdyaev’s case it was the spirit of communion; in Jaspers’s that of spiritual engagement. But in Heidegger’s case it was the spirit of overwhelming solitude.

      With the four essays in this book, which Professor Heidegger gave me, this much-discussed philosopher now appears for the first time before the English-speaking world. As Professor Heidegger pointed out to me, the four essays are complementary and have an organic unity. Two deal with the essence of metaphysics, the other two with the essence of poetry. The two Hölderlin studies, in Heidegger’s words, were born out of a necessity of thought conditioned by the questions raised in the metaphysical papers.

      STEFAN SCHIMANSKI

      INTRODUCTION

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

      I wish to thank Professor Dr. Heidegger who, through Mr. Schimanski and the publishing firm, expressed the desire some time ago that I should write an Introduction to his essays. Furthermore, I wish to thank most warmly my friend Mr. E. K. Bennett, the President of Gonville and Caius College and Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge, for his constant encouragement in carrying out this task as well as for making some most valuable suggestions in the final phrasing of mainly the second part of this Introduction. Moreover, I should like to thank the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning for their encouragement and support. My sincere thanks also go to Mr. R. P. Friedmann who assisted me in the final phrasing especially of the first part of this Introduction and shared with me the task of proof-reading.

      WERNER BROCK, DR. PHIL.

      Sometime Lecturer in Philosophy at the

      University of Freiburg i.B.

      Cambridge,

      January 31, 1949

      PREFATORY NOTE

      I have been asked to write an Introduction to this edition of four essays of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the first publication of a selected portion of his work in English. And I have agreed to do so, believing as I do that his theoretical work, above all his early systematic treatise Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Part I (1927), represents a valuable and most stimulating contribution to philosophical studies. It provoked great interest in Germany and abroad, and is likely eventually to arouse such an interest also among the philosophically minded English speaking public. I am of the opinion that this contribution made to philosophic thought can be and should be considered and appreciated independently of any question of politics in which Professor Heidegger was involved during the early period of the Nazi régime. The publication of the essays, two on the work of the eminent German poet Friedrich Hölderlin and two on relevant philosophic problems, seems to me timely in view of the great recognition which the thought of the author has received elsewhere. And I look forward to the day when his main philosophic work published hitherto, Being and Time, will be similarly accessible to the English-speaking reader. Although the essays presented here can make the reader acquainted with only a few aspects of the work of this contemporary thinker, it is hoped that they will prepare the ground for a more profound study of his thought, once Being and Time itself has been translated into English.

      The following Introduction deviates from the established form by being considerably more extensive. It has been felt that it may be of help to many of his readers if Heidegger’s thought which, particularly in the two essays on philosophic topics, offers marked difficulties of comprehension through its new terminology as well as through the original ideas behind it were reproduced in a simpler way. With regard to the essays themselves I envisage my task as that of emphasising and explaining some fundamental ideas and concepts advanced in them with a view to facilitating the reader’s study and assimilation of the text. Criticism is not required from an Introduction. Such criticism, good, incisive and helpful or arising from misunderstanding and irrelevant, is bound to come, once Heidegger’s ideas are submitted to intelligent discussion. My main aim is interpretative, on the assumption that I myself understand the text of the essays, at least in most points; and I shall raise a doubt only very rarely. The first essential is a proper understanding of Heidegger’s thought Judgement on his work and valid criticism can only come afterwards.

      But this Introduction will not restrict itself to a discussion of the essays themselves. The thought in all of them, as well as some specific ideas and terms, is, inevitably, related to Being and Time, even though the substantial content can be understood independently. Moreover, the name of Heidegger has become associated, mistakenly or not, with the movement now commonly termed Existentialism. And though he himself emphatically insists, and I think he is fundamentally right, that he has nothing whatever to do with it, the fact remains that it was his work Being and Time, together with Professor Karl Jaspers’ philosophic thought, both being stimulated by Kierkegaard in this respect, that gave rise to the movement in our age. Thus it would seem arbitrary and inappropriate to concentrate here exclusively on the four selected essays with the ideas which they single out and present. The reader unacquainted with both the Philosophy of Existence, as developed in Germany, and the outlook and main aim of Heidegger’s thought, has a right to expect from an Introduction to the first writings published in English-speaking countries that these more general problems should be discussed as well and that especially some kind of preliminary account of Being and Time should be given, in order to clarify the approach of the thinker. For without some notion of this work the reader of these essays is apt to grasp only aspects of thought, however relevant and stimulating, but not that profound and comprehensive homogeneity of outlook, which inevitably belongs to an original thinker of rank.

      This Introduction, therefore, falls into two parts. First I shall try to characterise Being and Time in its main problems and to give a somewhat detailed account of the fragment as published, basing my account strictly on the text, even to the point of a literal rendering as far as is possible. Afterwards I shall give a preliminary outline of the ideas contained in the four published essays.

      A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE

      CAREER OF M. HEIDEGGER

      A brief outline of the career of the thinker may preface the more general considerations.

      Martin Heidegger, born at Messkirch in the Black Forest in 1889 and, as a Roman Catholic, well acquainted with Thomistic thought from his early youth onwards, received his first philosophic training in the Neo-Kantian school of Windelband and Rickert. The thinkers of this school distinguished themselves in two main respects. They analysed the epistemological difference between the objects studied and the concepts applied in history and in kindred branches of knowledge and those of the natural sciences; and it was found that all historical studies, by their nature, were concerned with phenomena of an individuality of some kind or other, which were essentially related to values. At the same time, they approached the history of philosophy in a manner, novel at that time, by emphasising the great and fundamental problems advanced in the various periods of Occidental philosophy, from the days of the early Greeks to those of their own age. Heidegger’s first published work, his Thesis for the Lectureship, dealt with Duns Scotus’ doctrine of categories and of concepts, with the outlook of that medieval thinker whom Windelband appraised as the most acute and most profound of all. Thus Heidegger rooted himself at the start in the study of one great figure in the tradition of European philosophy, a tradition in relation to which all his later work was to be conceived. In his first lecture, given at Freiburg i.B. in the summer semester 1915, he discussed the concept of Time in historical studies, which likewise points from afar in the direction of his later great work Being and Time.

      It was, however, in close contact with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg i.B. from 1916 to 1929, that he developed his own method of the interpretation of the texts and ideas of great philosophers of the past, and of the exposition of systematic problems to which the tradition, from the Greeks to Husserl, and other eminent thinkers of the present age, gave rise. For to Heidegger, the study of the philosophic tradition and of systematic problems has been but one. He was and is convinced that only he who is steeped in the philosophic tradition, understanding the thought of a great thinker of the past, as if it were his own, philosophising with him, as it were, in dialogue and only then criticising him constructively, would eventually develop philosophic problems in an original manner worthy of being contemplated by his own contemporaries and by posterity.

      Solely on the strength of his stimulating and instructive teaching in lectures, the first form of publicity in which he embodied many of his own profoundly new investigations, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the university of Marburg a L. in 1923. During this period he produced and, in 1927, published his greatest work hitherto Being and Time, Part I. Despite its fragmentary character—only the first two out of six planned sections of the book were published—and despite the novelty of its approach to fundamental problems, which involved the use of a new philosophic language, difficult to understand,* the work made at once a profound impression upon the philosophically-minded public, even outside the sphere of the trained philosophers, and was soon considered to be a landmark in philosophic studies.

      Elected as Husserl’s successor to the Chair of Philosophy in Freiburg in 1929, and undoubtedly also spurred by the exceptionally wide-spread recognition of his work, its rank and originality, he published in quick succession three works of varying length. In the historical study Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics he gave a new interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, particularly its first half, placing in its centre the transcendental power of imagination as the root of the two stems of knowledge, intuition and understanding, and he related his own endeavours in Being and Time to Kant’s work as a renewed attempt at laying a foundation to metaphysics. In the systematic study On the Essence of Cause (or Ground), an essay dedicated to Husserl in honour of his 70th birthday, he discussed the fundamental problem of transcendence as the realm within which an enquiry into the nature of cause could be made, analysed the concept of the world, as well as transcendence, as the Being-in-the-world of Dasein, and distinguished three different kinds of ground, each of which is rooted in transcendence: (a) the founding (Stiften), (b) the gaining of ground (Boden-nehmen) of Dasein amidst all that is and (c) the more especial function of reasoning (Begründen), understood as Dasein being enabled to ask the question why. The third of these works was his Inaugural Lecture What is Metaphysics?, one of the essays published in the present English collection. All of these publications were closely connected with the problems of his main work, particularly the first two, elucidating its theme and purpose in a relevant way.

      In 1933, under the National Socialist régime, Professor Heidegger was elected Rector of Freiburg University, in which capacity he also delivered and published an Address on the position of German universities. He resigned this post early in 1934.

      A new departure in his philosophic thought was indicated by his essay on Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (1936); for the realm of poetry had so far not appeared to belong to his philosophic problems, still less to be outstanding among them. Interpretations of three individual poems of Hölderlin, two hymns Wie wenn am Feiertage (As when on a Festal Day), 1941, and Andenken (Remembrance), 1942, as well as one elegy Homecoming, 1944, have since been published; in addition an analysis of Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1942), a systematic essay of considerable import, On the Essence of Truth (1943), and a likewise important Letter on ‘Humanism’ (1947). Of these more recent publications by Heidegger two essays on Hölderlin and the one on the Essence of Truth have been selected for this edition.

      *His employment of a new philosophic language arose probably first in connection with his intense study of Greek and medieval philosophy, and with his endeavour to find an adequate terminology for the new problems which he was analysing; this tendency seems to have been strengthened by his belief in the wisdom embodied in language. It seems to me essentially to resemble the treatment of words by the modern German poets Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke who, likewise, felt incapable of expressing their visions and thought with the help of the traditional and generally accepted language.

      AN ACCOUNT OF BEING AND TIME

      1

      THE THREE MAIN PROBLEMS: DASEIN, TIME AND BEING.

      THE PROJECT AND THE PUBLISHED VERSION

      One important criterion for assessing the rank of a thinker is the relevance of the problem or problems originally envisaged by him, the intensity and consistency of thought with which he contemplates it or them and the lucidity of the exposition. Another criterion is that, under the impact of a philosophic work, the reader is induced to consider life and the world in a new way and that relevant aspects, unthought of or left in the background before, are brought into the full light of conscious reflection. A true philosopher differs from the scientist and scholar, with whom he is bound up by their common search for truth, not only through the fact that his problems are on a greater scale and more fundamental. But if his exposition is of weight, it implies a new outlook with the force of affecting, changing or stimulating that of the reader.

      Judged by these criteria, M. Heidegger’s Being and Time is a work of high rank. And it must be my first task to make its main purpose clearer.

      The aim of this great work, and indeed of all of Heidegger’s publications, is the re-awakening of the question: what is meant by Being?

      This problem belongs to the tradition of European philosophy from the Greek philosophers Anaximander and Parmenides onwards; more than that, it was its central problem. In Heidegger’s view, it guided the exertions of the greatest among the Pre-Socratic thinkers as well as those of Plato and of Aristotle—but after Aristotle it ceased to be the thematic problem of a genuine philosophic enquiry.

      The achievement of elucidation attained until Aristotle, affected vitally the medieval discussion of the problem and the whole of the Christian theological outlook; and through many changes the tradition of the problem kept alive down to Hegel’s Logic.

      To-day, and in fact throughout the last century, the problem of Being has fallen into oblivion*

      According to Heidegger, the concept of Being is the most universal one, as was also realised by Aristotle, Thomas and Hegel; and its universality goes beyond that of any genus. At the same time it is obscure and indefinable; Being cannot be comprehended as anything that is (Seiendes); it cannot be deduced from any higher concepts and it cannot be represented by any lower ones; Being is not something like a being, a stone, a plant, a table, a man. Yet Being seems somehow an evident concept. We make use of it in all knowledge, in all our statements, in all our behaviour towards anything that is, in our attitude towards ourselves. We are used to living in an understanding of Being (Seinsverständnis), but hand in hand with it goes the incomprehensibility of what is meant by Being.*

      Heidegger’s aim in Being and Time is to revive the question about the meaning of Being, in the sense in which it was the guiding problem of Greek thought until Aristotle and its express theme of enquiry. In this respect he takes the Greek thinkers as his model.

      But he deviates from them fundamentally in his starting-point. They reflected upon the things encountered in the world, that could be seen and thus known. And the thing that was perceived and about which statements could be made in various, relevant respects, i.e. by way of categories, was their paradigma.

      Heidegger’s starting-point is not the perceptible things, but what he terms: human Dasein, a phenomenon fundamentally, i.e. in its ontological structure, not contemplated and not analysed by the Greeks or ever since in later philosophic tradition. His endeavour in this respect is to give an analysis of the existentialia and of the existentialistic structure of human Dasein in a way in which the Greek thinkers developed the categories of a thing that is. But this analysis, profound and original as it is, is to him nothing but the starting-point. It is from this new angle that he intends to unfold the problem of Being afresh. And the final guiding aim should not be overlooked when the attention is drawn to the new starting-point. The analysis of Dasein is of an exclusively preparatory nature.

      Heidegger realised that Dasein—what is usually called human life, though both are not entirely the same—differed ontologically from all the things which are not Dasein in essential respects. These things, when they are there by nature, are termed vorhanden (existent in the usual sense of the word, literally: before one’s hand, at hand, present); and when they are made by men, such as utensils, they are termed zuhanden (close at hand, in readiness, at one’s disposal); but occasionally, the term Vorhandenes and Vorhandenheit applies to all that is not Dasein.

      (1) Dasein is always my own Dasein. It cannot be ontologically grasped as the case or the example of a genus of beings, as can be done with things that are vorhanden. This by itself causes considerable difficulties for the adequate ontological exposition.—Besides, the being of the kind of Dasein is in its Being concerned about its Being and behaves towards its Being as towards its own possibility. It chooses and decides and it may gain or may lose itself, inasfar as its Being is concerned. All this cannot be said of the things that are vorhanden.—Two fundamental modes of Being, authenticity and unauthenticity, are distinguished, both of them depending on the fact that Dasein is essentially always my own.

      (2) Of all the things that are vorhanden it can be stated that they are of a special genus, e.g. a house or a tree, and that they have special qualities. In other words: their essence is always ascertainable. In contrast to them, the characteristics of Dasein are not qualities, but possible ways of Being. Therefore the term Da-sein is to express not its essence, but its Being; it means Being there. To distinguish further the kind of Being, peculiar to Dasein, from all Vorhandenheit, the term Existence is applied exclusively to it. And the fundamental characteristics of Dasein, corresponding to the categories of Vorhandenheit, are therefore termed existentialia.*

      Heidegger’s own philosophic thought is grounded and deeply at home in the whole of the Occidental philosophic tradition from the earliest Greek thinkers to Kant and Hegel and beyond that to Kierkegaard, Husserl, Dilthey, Scheler and Jaspers. It would go beyond the framework of this brief introductory characterisation to consider the relatedness of Being and Time to any endeavour in thought of one of his great predecessors or contemporaries.†

      But it would seem appropriate to refer in passing to its relatedness to two more recent or contemporaneous tendencies: to the Philosophy of Existence, as inaugurated by Kierkegaard and prominently represented today by Jaspers; and to the method of phenomenology, as introduced by Husserl.

      Heidegger characterised his own attitude towards Kierkegaard, as follows: In the nineteenth century S Kierkegaard expressly seized upon and penetratingly thought out the problem of Existence as an existential one. But the existentialistic kind of problems (Problematik) is so alien to him that he is entirely under the sway of Hegel, and of the ancient philosophy seen through him, in ontological respect. Therefore more can be learnt philosophically from his ‘edifying’ writings than from the theoretical ones—with the exception of the treatise on the concept of dread.*

      This distinction between existential (existenziell) and existentialistic (existenzial) is a fundamental one. When Kierkegaard criticised Hegel that he had omitted the problem of the actual Existence of the individual in his apparently all-embracing speculative philosophy and when he wrote his own works of philosophical elucidation, his aim was primarily not a theoretical one, but he wished by his existential elucidations to serve and to guide other people in their conduct of life. The elucidation of Existence in Jaspers’ philosophy* takes fundamentally the same line. In the meditation upon Existence the knowledge of the objects of the world is transcended; but such meditation aims at appealing in communication to others and to clarify, stimulate and strengthen them in their striving for Existence in their actual conduct; Dasein, which is here taken to mean the same as life, and Existence, which is of an absolute significance to the individual, are radically distinguished. Existential philosophy is, by its nature, inseparably related to both insight and conduct.

      Heidegger’s interest in Existence is essentially different from that of either Kierkegaard or Jaspers. He regarded it as his task to analyse Dasein ontologically, as had not been done by the Greeks and was never attempted afterwards In this respect Existence seemed to him the fundamental characteristic of Dasein. But one important difference between science and learning on the one hand and philosophy on the other seemed to him to consist in the fact that every kind of scientific and scholarly knowledge was concerned with a limited set of objects, of what he termed ontic, whereas philosophy strove to envisage and analyse the far more hidden structure, and the guiding concepts, of the phenomenon basic to the set of objects, a visualisation and an analysis which is ontological. In this sense he states that philosophical psychology, anthropology, ethics, ‘politics’, literature, biography and history have been the studies of some aspects of Dasein and may have been existentially genuine (existenziell ursprünglich). But it remained an open question whether these investigations had been carried out in an equally genuine existentialistic (existenzial) manner, i.e. with a philosophic insight into and grasp of the ontological structure of Dasein. It is therefore with the existentialistic structure of Dasein, with what is basic to Existence, that Heidegger is concerned. Otherwise he could not compare the existentialia to the categories, analysed by Aristotle and since, of what is vorhanden.*

      Similarly he adapts the method of phenomenology, as introduced by Husserl, for his own philosophic purpose. The method was applied to prevent any arbitrary and ready-made epistemological constructions and to study and describe the whole range of the phenomena given to consciousness from the standpoint of transcendental subjectivity. In the last chapter of the Ideas to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy Husserl expressly discussed the problem of a formal ontology, of the transcendental constitution of a thing and of other regional ontologies.

      Heidegger adopted this method of philosophical analysis for Being and Time, and he adopted the aim of a regional ontology, namely of human Dasein, which, however, he considered to be the fundamental one preparing for an exposition of the meaning of Being. But his attitude is not

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